Qualcomm: Our dual-core chips will outperform competing quad-core A9s

I’m here at the Qualcomm Uplinq conference and you just know the company is touting its Snapdragon processor. Senior VP Rob Chandhok was confident enough to say that the company’s dual-core Snapdragon CPUs will be able to outperform competitors’ quad-core A9 CPUs.

In a wide-ranging interview, Chandhok didn’t mention the competition by name but he extolled the virtues of the company’s asynchronous architecture of its dual-core Snapdragon processor and said this type of design will lead to better performance without taking a tremendous hit on battery life. Without getting too technical, this enables the phones or tablets to amp up each core depending on need – by not using each core for each process, this could save battery life without compromising performance, Qualcomm says.

This architecture will be particularly useful when the company moves into the quad-core processing space, which is coming soon. Chandhok said the competition doesn’t do this mainly because it’s harder to do, especially when you don’t produce many of the other connectivity components in a mobile device like Qualcomm does.

The company is not bothered by the likes of NVIDIA already on the cusp of having quad-core chips out there because Chandhok said Qualcomm likes to make sure it has products that are done a certain way and done right. This includes high performance but also making battery life one of the highest priorities because consumers don’t care how powerful their phone or tablet is if it dies in two hours.

Of course, Qualcomm also powers 4G LTE devices like the Thunderbolt and the LG Revolution and these have atrocious battery life. Chandhok said this is just a byproduct of these using first-generation modem technology and future devices will have 4G LTE modems which are more deeply integrated into the system, which will reduce the battery consumption. Like any new technology, 4G LTE will take a little time for carriers, chip makers and handset makers to optimize it.

When Netflix for Android first landed on only Snapdragon handsets, I was very concerned that we could be entering a new era of hardware fragmentation – Chip makers could sign exclusive deals with companies to ensure that only certain phones could receive certain apps. One thing I was very happy to hear Chandhok say is that Qualcomm is not interested in causing fragmentation for consumers. For example, its Game Pack will feature games that perform better on Snapdragon handsets but these will also be available on other types of devices.